Vaz had introduced a Video Games Bill in March, which has expired. The UK's Department of Culture, Media and Sport were bewildered about all the fuss as well, while Vaz's office sounded a little vague about his contribution. The other thing is there's a very robust pan-European rating system." "I know this game is rated very properly," Wim Bekkers, director of Nicam, the Dutch equivalent of the BBFC, said of Rule of Rose, "It's a normal game with a 16 rating. But knee-jerk reactions are no help for law makers and classifiers, who appear to be satisfied with the way games have been subsumed into the existing system for classifying films and videos. Children's rights is an emotive subject, as the issue of school fingerprinting has illustrated in the UK. The tail of Frattini's letter suggests this is what he's really worried about: "We could focus on the relationship between our children and the 'inter-active world' they are confronted with nowadays: a world which brings along at the same time windows of positive opportunities as well as potential dangers".įrattini may have been thinking out loud about his responsibility for the Commission's Strategy for the Rights of the Child, launched in July. It stands to reason though - adult games are more expensive to produce because they are becoming, with every technological advance, more like immersive movie experiences. Yet there are, according to the industry, more games designed for toddlers than adults, which might explain part of Frattini's mix-up. pdf) last year that more than double the number of games players are above the age of 16 than under. Where's the report? There isn't one, he said, but "everybody knows" who really plays these adult computer games. Seventy-five per cent of computer games are played by 5 to 18 year-olds, said a more senior Justice official.
No, actually, it came from a Justice DG survey, which has yet to be published.
One said, for example, that 90 per cent of games players were between 10 and 20, so the ratings system was irrelevant. It's not any of Frattini's official business, so we can excuse their ignorance, but it was amusing to see his officials jumping through hoops to explain his intervention. Curiously, Frattini's office didn't know whether the same applied across all member states. Any video game featuring violent or sexual content has to be rated by the British Board of Film Classification. Doing so in the UK, for example, can lead to a prison sentence. National laws are left to take care of retailers who sell adult rated games to children. PEGI (Pan-European Games Information System), which rated Rule of Rose as a 16, established a voluntary code of conduct for classifying and labelling games across the EU in 2003, with the support Viviane Reding, Frattini's opposite number at the EC Directorate of Information Society and Media.
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